OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FIReStereo: Forest InfraRed Stereo Dataset for UAS Depth Perception in Visually Degraded Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Robust depth perception in visually-degraded environments is crucial for autonomous aerial systems. Thermal imaging cameras, which capture infrared radiation, are robust to visual degradation. However, due to lack of a large-scale dataset, the use of thermal cameras for unmanned aerial system (UAS) depth perception has remained largely unexplored. This paper presents a stereo thermal depth perception dataset for autonomous aerial perception applications. The dataset consists of stereo thermal images, LiDAR, IMU and ground truth depth maps captured in urban and forest settings under diverse conditions like day, night, rain, and smoke. We benchmark representative stereo depth estimation algorithms, offering insights into their performance in degraded conditions. Models trained on our dataset generalize well to unseen smoky conditions, highlighting the robustness of stereo thermal imaging for depth perception. We aim for this work to enhance robotic perception in disaster scenarios, allowing for exploration and operations in previously unreachable areas. The dataset and source code are available at https://firestereo.github.io.
ROCAS: Root Cause Analysis of Autonomous Driving Accidents via Cyber-Physical Co-mutation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

As Autonomous driving systems (ADS) have transformed our daily life, safety of ADS is of growing significance. While various testing approaches have emerged to enhance the ADS reliability, a crucial gap remains in understanding the accidents causes. Such post-accident analysis is paramount and beneficial for enhancing ADS safety and reliability. Existing cyber-physical system (CPS) root cause analysis techniques are mainly designed for drones and cannot handle the unique challenges introduced by more complex physical environments and deep learning models deployed in ADS. In this paper, we address the gap by offering a formal definition of ADS root cause analysis problem and introducing ROCAS, a novel ADS root cause analysis framework featuring cyber-physical co-mutation. Our technique uniquely leverages both physical and cyber mutation that can precisely identify the accident-trigger entity and pinpoint the misconfiguration of the target ADS responsible for an accident. We further design a differential analysis to identify the responsible module to reduce search space for the misconfiguration. We study 12 categories of ADS accidents and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROCAS in narrowing down search space and pinpointing the misconfiguration. We also show detailed case studies on how the identified misconfiguration helps understand rationale behind accidents.
GateAttentionPose: Enhancing Pose Estimation with Agent Attention and Improved Gated Convolutions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces GateAttentionPose, an innovative approach that enhances the UniRepLKNet architecture for pose estimation tasks. We present two key contributions: the Agent Attention module and the Gate-Enhanced Feedforward Block (GEFB). The Agent Attention module replaces large kernel convolutions, significantly improving computational efficiency while preserving global context modeling. The GEFB augments feature extraction and processing capabilities, particularly in complex scenes. Extensive evaluations on COCO and MPII datasets demonstrate that GateAttentionPose outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, including the original UniRepLKNet, achieving superior or comparable results with improved efficiency. Our approach offers a robust solution for pose estimation across diverse applications, including autonomous driving, human motion capture, and virtual reality.
ReGentS: Real-World Safety-Critical Driving Scenario Generation Made Stable
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning based autonomous driving systems often face challenges with safety-critical scenarios that are rare in real-world data, hindering their large-scale deployment. While increasing real-world training data coverage could address this issue, it is costly and dangerous. This work explores generating safety-critical driving scenarios by modifying complex real-world regular scenarios through trajectory optimization. We propose ReGentS, which stabilizes generated trajectories and introduces heuristics to avoid obvious collisions and optimization problems. Our approach addresses unrealistic diverging trajectories and unavoidable collision scenarios that are not useful for training robust planner. We also extend the scenario generation framework to handle real-world data with up to 32 agents. Additionally, by using a differentiable simulator, our approach simplifies gradient descent-based optimization involving a simulator, paving the way for future advancements. The code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/ReGentS.
Computing the LZ-End parsing: Easy to implement and practically efficient
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The LZ-End parsing [Kreft & Navarro, 2011] of an input string yields compression competitive with the popular Lempel-Ziv 77 scheme, but also allows for efficient random access. Kempa and Kosolobov showed that the parsing can be computed in time and space linear in the input length [Kempa & Kosolobov, 2017], however, the corresponding algorithm is hardly practical. We put the spotlight on their suboptimal algorithm that computes the parsing in time $\mathcal{O}(n \lg\lg n)$. It requires a comparatively small toolset and is therefore easy to implement, but at the same time very efficient in practice. We give a detailed and simplified description with a full listing that incorporates undocumented tricks from the original implementation, but also uses lazy evaluation to reduce the workload in practice and requires less working memory by removing a level of indirection. We legitimize our algorithm in a brief benchmark, obtaining the parsing faster than the state of the art.
Enhancing Cross-Market Recommendation System with Graph Isomorphism Networks: A Novel Approach to Personalized User Experience
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In today's world of globalized commerce, cross-market recommendation systems (CMRs) are crucial for providing personalized user experiences across diverse market segments. However, traditional recommendation algorithms have difficulties dealing with market specificity and data sparsity, especially in new or emerging markets. In this paper, we propose the CrossGR model, which utilizes Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs) to improve CMR systems. It outperforms existing benchmarks in NDCG@10 and HR@10 metrics, demonstrating its adaptability and accuracy in handling diverse market segments. The CrossGR model is adaptable and accurate, making it well-suited for handling the complexities of cross-market recommendation tasks. Its robustness is demonstrated by consistent performance across different evaluation timeframes, indicating its potential to cater to evolving market trends and user preferences. Our findings suggest that GINs represent a promising direction for CMRs, paving the way for more sophisticated, personalized, and context-aware recommendation systems in the dynamic landscape of global e-commerce.
A Toolchain for Assisting Migration of Software Executables Towards Post-Quantum Cryptography
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Quantum computing poses a significant global threat to today's security mechanisms. As a result, security experts and public sectors have issued guidelines to help organizations migrate their software to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Despite these efforts, there is a lack of (semi-)automatic tools to support this transition especially when software is used and deployed as binary executables. To address this gap, in this work, we first propose a set of requirements necessary for a tool to detect quantum-vulnerable software executables. Following these requirements, we introduce QED: a toolchain for Quantum-vulnerable Executable Detection. QED uses a three-phase approach to identify quantum-vulnerable dependencies in a given set of executables, from file-level to API-level, and finally, precise identification of a static trace that triggers a quantum-vulnerable API. We evaluate QED on both a synthetic dataset with four cryptography libraries and a real-world dataset with over 200 software executables. The results demonstrate that: (1) QED discerns quantum-vulnerable from quantum-safe executables with 100% accuracy in the synthetic dataset; (2) QED is practical and scalable, completing analyses on average in less than 4 seconds per real-world executable; and (3) QED reduces the manual workload required by analysts to identify quantum-vulnerable executables in the real-world dataset by more than 90%. We hope that QED can become a crucial tool to facilitate the transition to PQC, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses with limited resources.
Mapping Technical Safety Research at AI Companies: A literature review and incentives analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

As AI systems become more advanced, concerns about large-scale risks from misuse or accidents have grown. This report analyzes the technical research into safe AI development being conducted by three leading AI companies: Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI. We define safe AI development as developing AI systems that are unlikely to pose large-scale misuse or accident risks. This encompasses a range of technical approaches aimed at ensuring AI systems behave as intended and do not cause unintended harm, even as they are made more capable and autonomous. We analyzed all papers published by the three companies from January 2022 to July 2024 that were relevant to safe AI development, and categorized the 80 included papers into nine safety approaches. Additionally, we noted two categories representing nascent approaches explored by academia and civil society, but not currently represented in any research papers by these leading AI companies. Our analysis reveals where corporate attention is concentrated and where potential gaps lie. Some AI research may stay unpublished for good reasons, such as to not inform adversaries about the details of security techniques they would need to overcome to misuse AI systems. Therefore, we also considered the incentives that AI companies have to research each approach, regardless of how much work they have published on the topic. We identified three categories where there are currently no or few papers and where we do not expect AI companies to become much more incentivized to pursue this research in the future. These are model organisms of misalignment, multi-agent safety, and safety by design. Our findings provide an indication that these approaches may be slow to progress without funding or efforts from government, civil society, philanthropists, or academia.
Non-negative Weighted DAG Structure Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We address the problem of learning the topology of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from nodal observations, which adhere to a linear structural equation model. Recent advances framed the combinatorial DAG structure learning task as a continuous optimization problem, yet existing methods must contend with the complexities of non-convex optimization. To overcome this limitation, we assume that the latent DAG contains only non-negative edge weights. Leveraging this additional structure, we argue that cycles can be effectively characterized (and prevented) using a convex acyclicity function based on the log-determinant of the adjacency matrix. This convexity allows us to relax the task of learning the non-negative weighted DAG as an abstract convex optimization problem. We propose a DAG recovery algorithm based on the method of multipliers, that is guaranteed to return a global minimizer. Furthermore, we prove that in the infinite sample size regime, the convexity of our approach ensures the recovery of the true DAG structure. We empirically validate the performance of our algorithm in several reproducible synthetic-data test cases, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives.
$\mathbb{N}$-polyregular functions arise from well-quasi-orderings
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2024
Year: 2024

A fundamental construction in formal language theory is the Myhill-Nerode congruence on words, whose finitedness characterizes regular language. This construction was generalized to functions from $Σ^*$ to $\mathbb{Z}$ by Colcombet, Douéneau-Tabot, and Lopez to characterize the class of so-called $\mathbb{Z}$-polyregular functions. In this paper, we relax the notion of equivalence relation to quasi-ordering in order to study the class of $\mathbb{N}$-polyregular functions, that plays the role of $\mathbb{Z}$-polyregular functions among functions from $Σ^*$ to $\mathbb{N}$. The analogue of having a finite index is then being a well-quasi-ordering. This provides a canonical object to describe $\mathbb{N}$-polyregular functions, together with a powerful new characterization of this class.
Graph Neural Networks for Parkinsons Disease Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the promising performance of state of the art approaches for Parkinsons Disease (PD) detection, these approaches often analyze individual speech segments in isolation, which can lead to suboptimal results. Dysarthric cues that characterize speech impairments from PD patients are expected to be related across segments from different speakers. Isolated segment analysis fails to exploit these inter segment relationships. Additionally, not all speech segments from PD patients exhibit clear dysarthric symptoms, introducing label noise that can negatively affect the performance and generalizability of current approaches. To address these challenges, we propose a novel PD detection framework utilizing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). By representing speech segments as nodes and capturing the similarity between segments through edges, our GCN model facilitates the aggregation of dysarthric cues across the graph, effectively exploiting segment relationships and mitigating the impact of label noise. Experimental results demonstrate theadvantages of the proposed GCN model for PD detection and provide insights into its underlying mechanisms
A framework for measuring the training efficiency of a neural architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Measuring Efficiency in neural network system development is an open research problem. This paper presents an experimental framework to measure the training efficiency of a neural architecture. To demonstrate our approach, we analyze the training efficiency of Convolutional Neural Networks and Bayesian equivalents on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 tasks. Our results show that training efficiency decays as training progresses and varies across different stopping criteria for a given neural model and learning task. We also find a non-linear relationship between training stopping criteria, training Efficiency, model size, and training Efficiency. Furthermore, we illustrate the potential confounding effects of overtraining on measuring the training efficiency of a neural architecture. Regarding relative training efficiency across different architectures, our results indicate that CNNs are more efficient than BCNNs on both datasets. More generally, as a learning task becomes more complex, the relative difference in training efficiency between different architectures becomes more pronounced.
Reinforcement Learning Discovers Efficient Decentralized Graph Path Search Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph path search is a classic computer science problem that has been recently approached with Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to its potential to outperform prior methods. Existing RL techniques typically assume a global view of the network, which is not suitable for large-scale, dynamic, and privacy-sensitive settings. An area of particular interest is search in social networks due to its numerous applications. Inspired by seminal work in experimental sociology, which showed that decentralized yet efficient search is possible in social networks, we frame the problem as a collaborative task between multiple agents equipped with a limited local view of the network. We propose a multi-agent approach for graph path search that successfully leverages both homophily and structural heterogeneity. Our experiments, carried out over synthetic and real-world social networks, demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms learned and heuristic baselines. Furthermore, our results show that meaningful embeddings for graph navigation can be constructed using reward-driven learning.
Taylor-Sensus Network: Embracing Noise to Enlighten Uncertainty for Scientific Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Uncertainty estimation is crucial in scientific data for machine learning. Current uncertainty estimation methods mainly focus on the model's inherent uncertainty, while neglecting the explicit modeling of noise in the data. Furthermore, noise estimation methods typically rely on temporal or spatial dependencies, which can pose a significant challenge in structured scientific data where such dependencies among samples are often absent. To address these challenges in scientific research, we propose the Taylor-Sensus Network (TSNet). TSNet innovatively uses a Taylor series expansion to model complex, heteroscedastic noise and proposes a deep Taylor block for aware noise distribution. TSNet includes a noise-aware contrastive learning module and a data density perception module for aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Additionally, an uncertainty combination operator is used to integrate these uncertainties, and the network is trained using a novel heteroscedastic mean square error loss. TSNet demonstrates superior performance over mainstream and state-of-the-art methods in experiments, highlighting its potential in scientific research and noise resistance. It will be open-source to facilitate the community of "AI for Science".
Do Vision Foundation Models Enhance Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance in many supervised learning tasks when the training data distribution matches the test data distribution. However, their performance drops significantly under domain (covariate) shift, a prevalent issue in medical image segmentation due to varying acquisition settings across different scanner models and protocols. Recently, foundational models (FMs) trained on large datasets have gained attention for their ability to be adapted for downstream tasks and achieve state-of-the-art performance with excellent generalization capabilities on natural images. However, their effectiveness in medical image segmentation remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the domain generalization performance of various FMs, including DinoV2, SAM, MedSAM, and MAE, when fine-tuned using various parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques such as Ladder and Rein (+LoRA) and decoder heads. We introduce a novel decode head architecture, HQHSAM, which simply integrates elements from two state-of-the-art decoder heads, HSAM and HQSAM, to enhance segmentation performance. Our extensive experiments on multiple datasets, encompassing various anatomies and modalities, reveal that FMs, particularly with the HQHSAM decode head, improve domain generalization for medical image segmentation. Moreover, we found that the effectiveness of PEFT techniques varies across different FMs. These findings underscore the potential of FMs to enhance the domain generalization performance of neural networks in medical image segmentation across diverse clinical settings, providing a solid foundation for future research. Code and models are available for research purposes at \url{https://github.com/kerem-cekmeceli/Foundation-Models-for-Medical-Imagery}.
DPconv: Super-Polynomially Faster Join Ordering
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

We revisit the join ordering problem in query optimization. The standard exact algorithm, DPccp, has a worst-case running time of $O(3^n)$. This is prohibitively expensive for large queries, which are not that uncommon anymore. We develop a new algorithmic framework based on subset convolution. DPconv achieves a super-polynomial speedup over DPccp, breaking the $O(3^n)$ time-barrier for the first time. We show that the instantiation of our framework for the $C_\max$ cost function is up to 30x faster than DPccp for large clique queries.
On the challenges of studying bias in Recommender Systems: A UserKNN case study
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Statements on the propagation of bias by recommender systems are often hard to verify or falsify. Research on bias tends to draw from a small pool of publicly available datasets and is therefore bound by their specific properties. Additionally, implementation choices are often not explicitly described or motivated in research, while they may have an effect on bias propagation. In this paper, we explore the challenges of measuring and reporting popularity bias. We showcase the impact of data properties and algorithm configurations on popularity bias by combining synthetic data with well known recommender systems frameworks that implement UserKNN. First, we identify data characteristics that might impact popularity bias, based on the functionality of UserKNN. Accordingly, we generate various datasets that combine these characteristics. Second, we locate UserKNN configurations that vary across implementations in literature. We evaluate popularity bias for five synthetic datasets and five UserKNN configurations, and offer insights on their joint effect. We find that, depending on the data characteristics, various UserKNN configurations can lead to different conclusions regarding the propagation of popularity bias. These results motivate the need for explicitly addressing algorithmic configuration and data properties when reporting and interpreting bias in recommender systems.
Q-value Regularized Decision ConvFormer for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

As a data-driven paradigm, offline reinforcement learning (Offline RL) has been formulated as sequence modeling, where the Decision Transformer (DT) has demonstrated exceptional capabilities. Unlike previous reinforcement learning methods that fit value functions or compute policy gradients, DT adjusts the autoregressive model based on the expected returns, past states, and actions, using a causally masked Transformer to output the optimal action. However, due to the inconsistency between the sampled returns within a single trajectory and the optimal returns across multiple trajectories, it is challenging to set an expected return to output the optimal action and stitch together suboptimal trajectories. Decision ConvFormer (DC) is easier to understand in the context of modeling RL trajectories within a Markov Decision Process compared to DT. We propose the Q-value Regularized Decision ConvFormer (QDC), which combines the understanding of RL trajectories by DC and incorporates a term that maximizes action values using dynamic programming methods during training. This ensures that the expected returns of the sampled actions are consistent with the optimal returns. QDC achieves excellent performance on the D4RL benchmark, outperforming or approaching the optimal level in all tested environments. It particularly demonstrates outstanding competitiveness in trajectory stitching capability.